1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to anti-HBs monoclonal antibodies, a method for sensitizing fixed hemocytes with anti-HBs monoclonal antibodies, hemocytes sensitized with anti-HBs monoclonal antibodies, a method for measuring HBs antigen using anti-HBs monoclonal antibody-sensitized hemocytes, monoclonal antibodies for inhibiting non-specific reaction in measurement of HBs antigen and an inhibiting method thereby.
2. Prior Art
Hepatitis B is a disease caused by hepatitis B virus, which invades through a general infection route the blood. Babies are sometimes infected with this virus by mother-to-child transmission. About 90 percent of virus carriers are asymptomatic, but there is a risk of infection of others with this virus through the blood of the carriers, and the number of the carriers of this virus is estimated to be about 220 million in the world. In particular, the ratio of the carriers is high in Asia, and the number of patients in Japan is supposed to be about 1 million. Furthermore, hepatitis B has a high possibility of leading patients to more serious diseases such as liver cirrhosis and hepatocarcinoma.
In this situation, it is very important to discover and diagnose patients with hepatitis B and carriers of the virus, and also to detect hepatitis B virus in blood preparations. For this detection, along with the recent development of cell engineering technology, the hepatitis B surface antigen (abbreviated as HBs) in the specimen gets to be measured by using anti-HBs monoclonal antibody. Various types of anti-HBs monoclonal antibody have been obtained (for example, as disclosed in Japanese Kokai Nos. 56-73029, 62-10098, 57-501493, and 58-500300). And agglutinating reagents comprising erythrocytes sensitized with anti-HBs monoclonal antibody (for example, Japanese Kokai Nos. 58-127167 and 60-38656) and the measuring methods using them (for example, Japanese Kokai Nos. 57-501493 and 58-500300) have been developed. Furthermore, diagnosis kits using monoclonal antibodies to HBs are launched by some manufacturers.
In reverse passive agglutination reaction, nonspecific agglutinations may occur, and in order to inhibit them, the monoclonal antibody to other antigen than the antigen to be measured may be added in the reaction solution (as disclosed, for example, in Japanese Kokai No. 62-15464).
As the hemocytes used in the reverse passive agglutination reaction, fixed hemocytes of sheep or chicken are generally used, and sensitization of such hemocytes with monoclonal antibody was hitherto performed mainly in the presence of tannic acid.
So far, various anti-HBs monoclonal antibodies have been produced and various HBs measuring kits have been developed, but there has been a keen demand for those less in nonspecific reaction and higher in sensitivity.